From Jesus to Christ

Schmidt Number: S-2457

On-line since: 15th January 2007

LECTURE
X

Yesterday
we tried to characterise the path to Christ that can still be taken
today, as it could especially in earlier times, by exoteric means. We
will now touch briefly on the esoteric path — the path which
leads to Christ in such a way that he can be found within the
super-sensible worlds.

First of all we must
note that this esoteric path to Christ Jesus was also the way of the
Evangelists, of those who wrote the Gospels. For although the writer
of the John Gospel had himself witnessed many of the events he
describes — as you can see from the lecture-cycle on this
Gospel — his chief object was not merely to relate what he
remembered, for this applies only to those minute, exact details
which surprise us in his Gospel. The great, majestic, crowning
features of the work of redemption, of the Mystery of Golgotha, were
drawn by the writer of this Gospel from his clairvoyant consciousness
also. Consequently, although the Gospels are really revived Mystery
rituals — this is shown in my
Christianity as Mystical Fact
— they are so because the writers of the Gospels, following
their esoteric path, could procure for themselves out of the
super-sensible world a picture of the events in Palestine which led to
the Mystery of Golgotha. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha up to our
own times, a person who desired to come to a super-sensible experience
of the Christ-Event had to go through the stages which you will find
described in earlier lecture-cycles as the seven stages of our
Christian Initiation: The Washing of the Feet; The Scourging; The
Crowning with Thorns; The Mystic Death; The Burial; the Resurrection;
the Ascension. Today we will make clear to ourselves what the pupil
can attain by going through this Christian Initiation.

First of all, one
essential point. As you can convince yourselves by reading the
lectures on this subject, Christian Initiation is very different from
the incorrect method of Initiation described in the first lecture of
this course. In Christian Initiation certain feelings which belong to
humanity in general are first invoked, and they lead to an
Imagination of the Washing of the Feet. Thus the picture of this in
the John Gospel is not the first thing to be imagined; the aspirant
begins by trying to live for a long time with certain feelings and
perceptions. I have often characterised this by saying that the
person concerned should gaze upon the plant, which grows out of the
mineral ground, takes into itself the materials of the mineral
kingdom, and yet raises itself above this kingdom as a higher being
than the mineral. If the plant could speak and feel, it would bow
down to the mineral kingdom and say: ‘Certainly I was destined
within the economy of the Cosmos to attain a higher stage than you,
Mineral, but you give me the possibility of existence. In the order
of beings you are certainly a lower being than myself, but I have to
thank you for my existence, and I bow myself in humility before you.’
In the same way the animal would have to bow down to the plant,
although the plant is a lower being than the animal, and say: ‘I
thank you for my existence; I acknowledge it in humility, and I bow
myself before you.’ And so would each being that climbs upwards
have to bow down to the other standing below, and also he who has
risen by way of a spiritual ladder to a higher level must bow down to
the beings who alone have made this possible for him.

A person who
permeates himself with the feeling of humility in regard to the
lower, who thoroughly incorporates this feeling in his own being and
lets it live there for months, perhaps even for years, will see that
it spreads itself out in his organism, and so pervades him that he
experiences a transformation of this feeling into an Imagination. And
this Imagination corresponds exactly to the scene represented in the
John Gospel as the Washing of the Feet, where Christ Jesus, who is
the Head of the Twelve, stoops to those who stand here below Him in
the order of the physical world, and in humility acknowledges that He
thanks those who are below Him for the possibility of his higher
ascent. He acknowledges before the Twelve: ‘As the animal
thanks the plant, so do I thank you for what I was able to become in
the physical world!’ A person who permeates himself with this
feeling comes not only to an Imagination of the Washing of the Feet,
but also to a quite pronounced feeling, as though water were washing
over his feet. This can be felt for weeks: it shows how deeply imbued
our human nature is with such universal human feelings, which
nevertheless can raise man above himself.

Further, we have
seen that we can go through the experience which leads to the
Imagination of the Scourging when we place the following vividly
before us: ‘Much suffering and pain will meet me in the world;
yes, from all sides suffering and pain may come; no one escapes them.
But I will so steel my will that suffering and pain, the scourgings
that come from the world, may do their worst; I will stand upright
and bear my fate resignedly, as it comes to pass. For had it not come
to pass as it has done, as I have experienced it, I should not have
been able to reach the height I have attained.’ When the person
in question makes this a matter of his perception, and lives within
it, he actually feels something like sharp pains and woundings, like
strokes of a scourge against his own skin, and the Imagination arises
as if he were outside himself, and was watching himself scourged
according to the example of Christ Jesus. In line with this example
one can experience the Crowning of Thorns, the Mystic Death, and so
on. This has often been described.

What is attained by
a man who thus seeks within himself to experience first the four
stages, and then, when his karma is favourable, the others also,
making in all seven stages of Christian Initiation? From the
foregoing description you can gather that the whole scale of feelings
we go through ought to strengthen us and give us power, and ought to
make us into quite another nature, so that in the world we feel
ourselves standing strong, powerful and free, and also capable of
every act of devoted love. In Christian Initiation, this ought in a
deep sense to become a second nature to us. For what has to happen?

Perhaps it has not
yet occurred to all those of you who have read the earlier elementary
cycles, and so have met with Christian Initiation in its seven
stages, that owing to the intensity of the experiences which must be
undergone, the effects go right into the physical body. For through
the strength and power with which we go through these feelings, it
really is at first as if water were washing over our feet, and then
as if we were transfixed with wounds. We actually feel as if thorns
were pressing into our head; we feel all the pain and suffering of
the Crucifixion. We have to feel this before we can experience the
Mystical Death, the Burial, and the Resurrection, as these also have
been described. Even if we have not gone through these feelings with
sufficient intensity, they will certainly have the effect that we
become strong and full of love in the right sense of the word. But
what we then incorporate can go only as far as the etheric body.

When, however, we
begin to feel that our feet are as though washed with water, our body
as if covered with wounds, then we have succeeded in driving these
feelings so deeply into our nature that they have penetrated as far
as the physical body. They do indeed penetrate the physical body, and
then the stigmata, the marks of the bleeding wounds of Christ Jesus,
may appear. We drive the feelings inwards into the physical body and
know that they develop their strength in the physical body itself. We
consciously feel ourselves more in the grip of our whole being than
if the impressions were merely in the astral body and etheric body.
The essential thing is that through a process of mystical feeling we
work right into our physical body; and when we do this we are doing
nothing less than making ourselves ready in our physical body to
receive the Phantom that went forth from the grave on Golgotha. Hence
we work into our physical body in order to make it so living that it
feels a relationship with, an attractive force towards, the Phantom
that rose out of the grave on Golgotha.

And here I would
make an incidental remark. In Spiritual Science one must accustom
oneself to becoming acquainted with cosmic secrets and cosmic truths
gradually. Anyone who is not prepared to wait for the relevant truths
will not make good progress. Of course people would like to have
Spiritual Science all at once, preferably in one book or in one
course of lectures. But that cannot be so, as you will see from an
example. How long is it since in earlier lectures Christian
Initiation was first described? You heard that such and such takes
place, and that the individual, through the feelings which affect his
soul, works right into his physical body. Everything said in those
earlier lectures was intended to provide some elements for
understanding the Mystery of Golgotha, and now for the first time it
is possible to describe how an individual, through the requisite
exercises of feeling in the course of Christian Initiation, makes
himself ripe to receive the Phantom which rose from the grave of
Golgotha. We had to wait until the union of the subjective with the
objective could be found; and for this many preparatory lectures were
necessary. Even today there are many things that can be indicated
only as ‘half truths’. Anyone who has patience to
continue with us — whether in this or in another incarnation,
each according to his karma — will have seen how he could
advance from the description of the mystical path in the Christian
sense to the description of the objective fact, and so to the real
meaning of this Christian Initiation, and he will see also that still
higher truths will be brought to light from out of Spiritual Science
in the course of the coming years or the next age. Thus we see the
aim, the goal, of Christian Initiation.

Through what has
been characterised as Rosicrucian Initiation, i.e. what an individual
can have of it as Initiation today, the same thing in a certain sense
is also attained, only by somewhat different means. A bond of
attraction is formed between the individual, in so far as he is
incorporated in a physical body, and that which arose as the real
prototype of the physical body from the grave of Golgotha. Now we
know from previous lectures that we are at the starting-point of a
world-epoch in which we must expect an event that will not take place
on the physical plane, as did the Event of Golgotha, but in the
super-sensible world; an event which nevertheless stands in a close
and true connection with the Event of Golgotha. The latter was
designed to give back to man his real physical force-body, the
Phantom which had degenerated from the beginning of the
Earth-evolution, and for the giving back of it a series of events on
the physical plane had to occur; but for that which is now to happen
an event on the physical plane is not necessary. An incarnation of
the Christ-Being in a human body of flesh could take place only once
in the course of the Earth-evolution. When people announce a
repetition of the incarnation of this Being, it simply means that the
Christ-Being is not understood.

The event now to
come, which can be observed only in a super-sensible world, has been
characterised in the words: ‘Christ becomes for men the Lord of
Karma.’ This means that in future the ordering of karmic
transactions will come about through Christ. Ever more and more will
men of the future feel: ‘I am going through the gate of death
with my karmic account. On one side stand my good, clever, and
beautiful deeds, my clever, beautiful, good, and intelligent
thoughts; on the other side stands everything evil, wicked, stupid,
foolish and loathsome. But He who in the future will have the office
of Judge for the incarnations which will follow in human evolution,
in order to bring order into this karmic account of men, is the
Christ!’ And truly we have to picture this in the following
way:

After we have gone
through the gate of death, we shall be incarnated again in a later
period. We shall then have to encounter events through which our
karma can be balanced, for every man must reap what he has sown.
Karma is a just law. But what the karmic law has to fulfill is not
there only for individual men. Karma does not only balance the
accounts of each Ego, but in every case the balancing must be
arranged so as to be in the best possible accord with the concerns of
the whole world. It must enable us to give all possible help to the
advancement of mankind on earth. For this we need enlightenment, not
merely the knowledge that the karmic fulfillment of our deed must
come about. The fulfillment can take a form which will be either less
or more useful for the general progress of humanity. Hence we must
choose those thoughts, feelings or perceptions which will pay off our
karma and at the same time serve the collective progress of mankind.
In the future it will fall to Christ to bring the balance of our
karma into line with the general Earth-karma and the general progress
of humanity. And this happens principally in the time between death
and a new birth. But it will also be prepared for in the epoch of
time we are now approaching, before whose door we stand, because men
will more and more acquire the capacity for a special experience.
Very few are capable of it now, but from the middle of this century
onwards, through the next 1,000 years, more and more people will have
the following experience.

A person has done
this or that. He will feel constrained to reflect on his action, and
something like a dream-picture, arising in his mind, will make a
quite remarkable impression on him. He will say to himself: ‘I
cannot identify this as a recollection of something I have done, yet
it feels like an experience of my own.’ Like a dream-picture it
will stand there before him, closely concerned with him; but he
cannot recall that he has experienced or done it in the past. If he
is an anthroposophist he will understand the matter; otherwise he
will have to wait until he comes to Anthroposophy and learns to
understand it. The anthroposophist will know: ‘What you see as
an apparent consequence of your actions is a picture that will be
fulfilled in the future; the balancing of your actions is shown to
you in advance.’ We are at the beginning of an epoch in which
men, directly after they have committed a deed, will have a
premonition, a feeling, perhaps even a significant picture, of how
this deed will be karmically balanced.

Thus, in closest
connection with human experience, enhanced capabilities for humanity
will arise during the coming epoch. These capabilities will give a
powerful stimulus to human morality, and this will signify something
quite different from the voice of conscience, which has been a
preparation for it. The individual will no longer believe: ‘What
I have done will die with me.’ He will know quite exactly: ‘My
action will not die when I die; it will have a consequence which will
live on with me.’ And there is much else that the individual
will know. The time during which the doors of the spiritual world
have been closed to men is nearly over. Men must again climb up into
the spiritual world. Their awakening capacities will enable them to
participate in the spiritual world. Clairvoyance will always be
different from this participation. Just as there was an ancient
dreamlike clairvoyance, so will there be a future clairvoyance that
is not dreamlike, the clairvoyance of people who know what they are
doing and what it signifies.

Something else, too,
will come about. The individual will know: ‘I am not alone.
Everywhere there are spiritual beings who stand in a relationship to
me.’ Men will learn to communicate with these beings and to
live with them. And in the next three thousand years the truth that
Christ is acting as Karmic Judge will become apparent to a
sufficiently large number of people. Christ Himself will be
experienced by men as an etheric Form. Like Paul before Damascus,
they will know quite intimately that Christ lives, and is the Source
for the reawakening of the physical prototype we received at the
beginning of our evolution, and need if the Ego is to attain full
development.

If through the
Mystery of Golgotha something happened which gave the greatest
impetus to human evolution, on the other hand it came at the time
when the human mind, the human soul, were in their darkest condition.
There were indeed ancient periods of evolution when men could know
with certainty, because they had an ancestral memory, that the human
individuality goes through repeated earth-lives. In the Gospels the
teaching of repeated earth-lives is apparent only when we understand
the Gospels and can discern traces of it there. That was the time
when men were least fitted to comprehend this teaching. In the later
times when men sought for Christ along the path indicated yesterday,
everything had to take the form of a childlike preparation. Men could
not then be made acquainted with experiences concerning
reincarnation; they were not ripe for it and it would only have led
them into error. Christianity had to develop for nearly 2,000 years
without being able to indicate the teaching of reincarnation.

We have shown in
these lectures how different it was in Buddhism, and how in Western
consciousness the thought of repeated earth-lives arises as something
self-evident. Certainly, many misunderstandings still prevail; but
whether we take this idea from Lessing or from the psychologist
Drossbach, we become aware that for the European consciousness the
teaching of reincarnation concerns humanity at large, whereas in
Buddhism the individual regards the question of how he goes from life
to life, how he can free himself from the thirst for existence, as
concerning only his personal inner life. The Oriental makes what is
given to him as teaching about reincarnation into a path of
individual redemption, whereas for Lessing the essential question
was: ‘How can the whole of humanity move forward?’
According to Lessing, we must distinguish successive periods of time
within the progressive development of humanity. Something new is
given to humanity in each epoch. We see from history that new
civilising actions keep on emerging in the course of human
development. How could one speak of the evolution of the whole of
humanity, says Lessing, if a soul lived in only one epoch? Whence
could the fruits of civilisation come if human beings were not born
again, if what they had learnt in one epoch were not carried over
into the next, and its fruits into the following epoch and so on?

Thus for Lessing the
idea of repeated earth-lives is not only a concern of the individual
soul. It concerns the whole course of earthly civilisation. And in
order that an advanced civilisation may arise, a soul which lives in
the nineteenth century must carry over into its present existence
whatever it had previously gained. For the sake of the earth and its
civilisation, human beings must be born again. That is Lessing's
thought. But in this thought of reincarnation as concerning all
mankind the Christ-Impulse has been at work, woven into it. For the
Christ-Impulse makes everything a man does or can do into an action
of universal relevance, not something that touches him only as an
individual. He only can be Christ's disciple who says: ‘I
do it for the least of the brethren, because I know Thou feelest as
though I had done it for Thee.’ As the whole of humanity is
bound up with Christ, so does he who confesses Christ feel that he
belongs to all mankind. This thought has worked into the thinking,
feeling, and perception of the whole human race. And when the idea of
reincarnation reappeared in the eighteenth century, it appeared as a
Christian thought. And although Widenmann treated reincarnation
clumsily, in an embryonic way, yet in his prize essay of 1851 his
thought of reincarnation is permeated by the Christian impulse. He
devotes a special chapter to showing the connection between
Christianity and the teaching of reincarnation.

It was necessary in
human evolution that souls should first accept the other Christian
impulses, so that the thought of reincarnation might come to our
consciousness in a ripe form. And indeed this thought of
reincarnation will so connect itself with Christianity that it will
be felt as something that leads a person on through successive
incarnations. We shall understand how individuality, which is
completely lost according to the Buddhist view — as we saw from
the conversation of King Milinda with the sage Nagasena — first
receives its true content by becoming permeated with Christ. We can
now understand why the Buddhist view, about 500 years before the
appearance of Christ, lost the human Ego, while retaining the
teaching of successive incarnations. We have reached a time in which
the human organism must understand, accept, permeate itself with the
thought of reincarnation. For the progress of human evolution does
not depend on what teachings are promulgated or find a new foothold.
Other laws come into consideration, and they do not depend upon
ourselves.

In the future human
nature will develop certain powers which will have the effect that
the individual, as soon as he has reached a certain age and has
become properly conscious of himself, will have the feeling: ‘There
is something in me which I must understand.’ This feeling will
take hold of men more and more. In past times, even when human beings
were fully aware of themselves, the consciousness which is now to
come did not exist. It will express itself somewhat as follows: ‘I
feel something within me which is connected with my personal ego.
Strangely, it will not fit in with all that I have come to know since
birth.’ One man will understand what is at work here; another
will not. A man will understand it if he has carried the teachings of
Spiritual Science into his life. Then he will know: ‘What I am
now feeling is foreign to me, because it is the ego that has come
over from earlier lives.’ This will oppress the heart, will
cause fear and anxiety, in those who cannot explain it by repeated
earth-lives. These feelings, which are not merely a theoretical
uncertainty but a starving, a cramping, of life, will disappear
through the perceptions given to us by Spiritual Science, which tell
us: ‘You must think of your life as extended over earlier
earth-lives.’ Then men will see what it means for them to
experience the connection with the Christ-Impulse. For it is the
Christ-Impulse which will give life to the whole retrospective view,
the whole perspective of the past. A man will feel: ‘Here was
this incarnation; there, that one.’ Then he will come to a time
beyond which he will be unable to go without clearly understanding:
‘The Christ-Impulse was then on earth!’ Incarnations will
be followed further back to a time when the Christ-Event was not yet
there. This illumination of the retrospective view through the
Christ-Impulse will be needed by men for their assurance in the
future, as a necessity and a help which can flow into later
incarnations.

This transformation
of the human soul will derive from the Event which begins in the
twentieth century and may be called the second Christ-Event, so that
those persons in whom higher faculties have awakened will look upon
the Lord of Karma. Some of you may say that when the Christ-Event of
the twentieth century takes place, many of those now living will be
with those who have fallen asleep, will be in the time between death
and a new birth. But whether a person is living in a physical body,
or in the time between death and a new birth, if he has prepared
himself for the Christ-Event, he will experience it. The vision of
the Christ-Event does not depend on whether we are incarnated in a
physical body, but the preparation for the Christ-Event does so
depend. Just as it was necessary that the first Christ-Event should
take place on the physical plane in order that the salvation of man
could be accomplished, so must the preparation be made here in the
physical world, the preparation to look with full understanding, with
full illumination, upon the Christ-Event of the twentieth century.
For a person who looks upon it unprepared, when his powers have been
awakened, will not be able to understand it. The Lord of Karma will
then appear to him as a fearful judgment. In order to have an
illuminated understanding of this Event, the individual must be
prepared. The spreading abroad of the anthroposophical
world-conception has taken place in our time for this purpose, so
that men can be prepared on the physical plane to perceive the
Christ-Event either on the physical plane or on the higher planes.
Those who are not sufficiently prepared on the physical plane, and
then go unprepared through the life between death and a new birth,
will have to wait until, in the next incarnation, they can be further
prepared through Anthroposophy for the understanding of Christ.
During the next 3,000 years the opportunity will be given to men of
going through this preparation, and the purpose of all
anthroposophical development will be to render men more and more
capable of participating in that which is to come.

Thus we understand
how the past flows over into the future. When, for example, we recall
how the Buddha permeated the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child,
we see how the activity of the Buddha forces continued after he
himself no longer needed to incarnate again on earth. And when we
remember how influences not directly connected with the Buddha worked
on in the West, we see how the spiritual world penetrates the
physical.

All this preparation
is connected with the fact that men are always drawing nearer to an
ideal which dawned in ancient Greece, an ideal formulated by
Socrates: that when a man grasps the idea of the good, the moral, the
ethical, he feels this idea as so magical an impulse that he becomes
capable of living in accordance with it as an ideal. Today we are not
so far advanced that this ideal can be realised; we are only so far
on that in certain circumstances a man may very well form a concept
of the good; he may be very clever and wise, and yet he need not be
morally good. The direction of inner evolution, however, is such that
the ideas we hold of the good will immediately become moral impulses.
That is the intent of the evolution we shall experience in the
approaching times. And the teachings given on earth will increasingly
be such that in the course of future centuries and millennia human
speech will come to have an effect unimaginably greater than it has
now or ever had in the past. Today in the higher worlds anyone can
see clearly the connection between intellect and morality; but as yet
there is no human speech which works so magically that when a moral
principle is stated, it sinks down into a man as a new idea, so that
he perceives it as directly moral, and cannot do otherwise than act
upon it as a moral impulse. After the next 3,000 years it will be
possible to use a form of speech that could not now be entrusted to
our heads. It will be such that everything intellectual will at the
same time be moral, and this moral element will penetrate into the
hearts of men. During the next 3,000 years the human race must become
as though permeated with magical morality. Otherwise men would not be
able to bear such an evolution; they would only misuse it.

For the special
preparation of an evolution of this kind we must look at a much
slandered individuality who lived about a century before our era. He
is mentioned, though certainly in a distorted form, in Hebrew
writings as Jeschu Ben Pandira — Jesus the son of Pandira. From
lectures once given in Berne, some of you will know that this Jeschu
Ben Pandira worked in preparation for the Christ-Event by training
pupils, among whom was one who became the teacher of the writer of
the Gospel of Matthew. Jeschu Ben Pandira, a noble Essene figure,
preceded Jesus of Nazareth by a century. Jesus of Nazareth Himself
only went among the Essenes, whereas Jeschu Ben Pandira was
altogether an Essene.

Who was Jeschu Ben Pandira?

The successor of
that Bodhisattva who in his final earthly incarnation had risen in
his twenty-ninth year to be Gautama Buddha was incorporated in the
physical body of Jeschu Ben Pandira. Every Bodhisattva who rises to
the rank of a Buddha has a successor. This oriental tradition
corresponds exactly with occult research. The Bodhisattva who worked
at that time in preparation for the Christ-Event was re-embodied
again and again. One of his re-embodiments is fixed for the twentieth
century. It is impossible to speak here more exactly concerning the
re-embodiment of this Bodhisattva; something, however, can be said
about the way in which such a Bodhisattva may be recognised.

Through a law which
will be demonstrated and explained in future lectures, it is a
peculiarity of this Bodhisattva that when he reappears in a new
embodiment — and he always reappears thus in the course of the
centuries — he is quite dissimilar in his youth from what he
comes to be in his later activities. At a quite definite point of
time in the life of this Bodhisattva, something like a revolution, a
great transformation, always takes place. To express it more in
detail, in some place or other there is a more or less gifted child,
in whom it is not noticeable that he has to do anything special in
preparation for the future evolution of humanity. Occult research
confirms that no one during his childhood and youth gives so little
sign of what he really is as he who is to incorporate a Bodhisattva.
For at a certain point of time in his life a great change comes over
him. If an individuality from the remote past — Moses, for
example — is incorporated, it is not the same with him as it
was with the Christ individuality, to whom Jesus of Nazareth left the
sheaths. In the case of a Bodhisattva there certainly will be
something like an exchange, but the individuality remains in a
certain sense, and the individuality who comes from the remote past —
as patriarch or another — and is to bring new forces for the
evolution of humanity, descends, and the human being who receives him
experiences an immense transformation. This transformation occurs
particularly between the thirtieth and thirty-third years. It can
never be known beforehand that this body will be taken possession of
by the Bodhisattva. The change never shows itself in youth. The
distinctive feature is precisely that the later years are so unlike
the youthful ones.

He who was
incorporated in Jeschu Ben Pandira — the Bodhisattva who was
repeatedly reincarnated, and who succeeded Gautama Buddha — has
prepared himself for his Bodhisattva-incarnation so that he can
reappear and rise to the Buddha dignity exactly 5,000 years after the
illumination of Gautama Buddha under the bodhi-tree. Here again
occult investigation fully agrees with oriental tradition. So, 3,000
years from now, this Bodhisattva, looking back on all that has
happened in the new epoch, and looking back on the Christ-Impulse and
all that is connected with it, will speak in such a way that his
speech will make into a reality what has just been characterised:
intellectuality will become directly moral. The future Bodhisattva,
who will place all that he has at the service of the Christ-Impulse,
will be a Bringer of the Good through the Word, through the Logos. He
will speak in a language as yet possessed by no man, but a language
which is so holy that he who speaks it can be called a Bringer of the
Good. This also will not show itself in his youth, but approximately
in his thirty-first year he will appear as a new man, and will yield
himself up as the one who can be filled with a higher individuality.
The experience of one single incarnation in the flesh holds good only
for Christ Jesus. All Bodhisattvas go through various successive
incarnations on the physical plane. This Bodhisattva, 3,000 years
hence, will have advanced so far that he will be a Bringer of the
Good, a Maitreya Buddha, who will place his Words of Goodness at the
service of the Christ-Impulse, which a sufficient number of men will
by then have made part of their lives. The perspective of the future
development of man tells us this today.

What was necessary
so that human beings could come gradually to this epoch of evolution?
This we can make clear as follows.

If we wish to make a
graphic picture of what happened in ancient Lemuria for the
earth-evolution of man, we can say: That was the time when man
descended from Divine Heights: it was ordained for him that he should
develop further in a certain way, but through the Luciferic influence
he was cast down more deeply into matter than he would have been
without that influence. Thereby his path in evolution became
different.

When man had gone
downwards to the lowest stage, a powerful impetus in the upward
direction was required. This impetus could come about only because in
the higher worlds the Being whom we designate as the Christ-Being had
formed a resolution which He would not have needed to take for His
own evolution. For the Christ-Being would also have attained His
evolution if He had taken a path far, far above the path that men
were pursuing. He could have passed by, so to speak, far above the
evolution of humanity. But if the upward impulse had not been given,
human evolution would have been compelled to continue on its downward
path. The Christ would have had an ascent, but humanity a downfall.
Only because the Christ-Being had taken the resolution to unite
Himself at the time of the Events of Palestine with a man, to embody
Himself in a man and to make the upward path possible for humanity —
only this could bring about the Redemption of humanity, as we may now
call it: redemption from the impulse brought by the Luciferic forces
and designated symbolically in the Bible as ‘original sin’,
the Temptation by the Serpent and the original sin that was its
consequence. Christ accomplished something that was not necessary for
Himself.

What kind of Act was this?

It was an act of
Divine Love. We must be quite clear that no human feeling is capable
of realising the intensity of love that was needed for a God to make
a decision — a decision He had no need to make — to work
upon earth in a human body. Thereby, through an act of love, the most
important event in human evolution was brought about. And when men
grasp this act of love by a God, when they try to grasp it as a great
ideal in contrast with which every human act of love can be but
small, then, through this feeling of utter disproportion between
human love and the Divine Love needed for the Mystery of Golgotha,
they will draw near to the building up, to the giving birth within
them, of those Imaginations which place before our spiritual gaze the
momentous Event of Golgotha. Yes, verily, it is possible to attain to
the Imagination of the mount on which the Cross was raised, that
Cross on which hung a God in human body, a God who out of his own
free will, out of Love, accomplished the act whereby the earth and
humanity could reach their goal.

If the God who is
designated by the name of the Father had not at one time permitted
the Luciferic influences to come to man, man would not have developed
the free Ego. With the Luciferic influence, the conditions for the
free Ego were established. That had to be permitted by the
Father-God. But just as the Ego, for the sake of freedom, had to
become entangled in matter, so then, in order that the Ego might be
freed from this entanglement, the entire love of the Son had to lead
to the Act of Golgotha. Through this alone the freedom of man, the
complete dignity of man, first became possible. For the fact that we
can be free beings, we have to thank a Divine Act of Love. As men we
may feel free beings, but we may never forget that for this freedom
we have to thank this Act of Love. Then, in the midst of our feeling,
the thought will arise: ‘You can attain to the value, the
dignity, of a man; but one thing you may not forget, that for being
what you are you have to thank Him who has brought back to you your
human prototype through the Redemption on Golgotha.’ Men should
not be able to lay hold of the thought of freedom without the thought
of Redemption through Christ: only then is the thought of freedom
justified. If we will to be free, we must bring the offering of
thanks to Christ for our freedom. Then only can we really perceive
it. And those who consider that their dignity as men is restricted
when they thank Christ for it, should recognise that human opinions
have no significance in face of cosmic facts, and that one day they
will very willingly acknowledge that their freedom was won by Christ.

* * *

What we have been
able to do in these lectures is not very much for gaining a closer
understanding of the Christ-Impulse, and of the whole course of human
evolution on earth, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. We can
only bring together single building-stones. But if the effect upon
our souls is something like a renewed stimulus to further effort, to
further development along the path of knowledge, then these stones
will have done their work for the great spiritual temple of humanity.
And the best we can carry away from a spiritual-scientific study such
as this is that once more we have learnt something towards a certain
goal, that we have again somewhat enriched our knowledge. And our
high goal is this: that we may know more exactly how much we still
need to know. Then we shall be more and more permeated with the truth
of the old Socratic saying: ‘The more a man learns, the more he
knows how little he knows.’ But this conviction is good only
when it is not a confession of passive, easy-going resignation, but
testifies to a living will and effort towards an ever-extending
knowledge. We ought not to acknowledge how little we know by saying,
‘Since we cannot know everything, we would rather learn
nothing; so let us fold our hands in our lap.’ That would be a
false result of spiritual-scientific study. The right result is to be
more and more inspired to further striving; to regard every new thing
learnt as a step towards the attainment of yet higher stages.

In these lectures we
have perhaps had to say much about the Redemption-thought without
often using the word. This Redemption-thought should be felt by a
seeker after the spirit as it was felt by a great forerunner of our
Spiritual Science: that it is related and entrusted to our souls only
as a consequence of our striving after the highest goals of knowing,
feeling and willing. And as this great forerunner connects the word
‘Redemption’ with the word ‘striving’ and has
expressed it in the line, ‘Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
den können wir erlösen’ — ‘He who never
gives up striving, he it is whom we can redeem’ — so
should the anthroposophist always feel. The true Redemption can be
grasped and felt and willed in its own realm only by someone who
never gives up.

May this
lecture-cycle — which has been specially laid upon my heart,
because so much has to be said in it concerning the
Redemption-thought — be a stimulus to our further endeavours;
may we find ourselves ever more and more united in our endeavours,
during this incarnation and in later ones. May this be the fruit
which comes from such studies. With this we will close, taking with
us as a stimulus the thought that we must continually exert
ourselves, in order that we may see what the Christ is, on the one
hand, and on the other may draw nearer to Redemption, which is being
set free not merely from the lower earth-path and earth-fate, but
free also from everything that hinders man from attaining his dignity
as man. But these things are written down truly only in the annals of
the Spiritual. For the script that can be read in spiritual realms is
the only true writing. Let us therefore strive to read the chapter
concerning the dignity of man and the mission of man, in the script
where these things stand written in the spiritual worlds.